Discover legacy content from FontShop.com, preserved for your reference.

Weird and Wonderful | FontShop
Please update your browser. Why?

Weird and Wonderful

Stephen Coles
Last edited May 01, 2014

Clean and functional type gets all the attention in modern design. With a defiant nose-thumbing at that trend, here are oddities, personal favorites that come from the darkest, strangest corners of archaic typefounding — or from no historical model at all, but rather the creative minds of today’s most innovative font makers. These aren’t the faces you’d expect to see on an annual report. But how fantastic our world would be if you did!

grapes
hypothenuses
Sunshade with the firm crust

The Venus type family is a historic hot metal face with left slanted weights that is used for the german cartographic map production. There are also special typefaces required like the Roemisch and Topografische Zahlentafel type family.

safety
fiddlesticks
Please carefully bang head

Claude Sans is the work of British designer Alan Meeks. The conservative roman weight is complemented by a more extravagant italic. The proportions are based on those of the original Garamond typeface of Claude Garamond, from whom this type gets its name. Claude Sans can be used alone or combined with Claude Sans italic and bold weights.

Glue
Gareth Hague Alias 2013
EF Hawthorn Esselte Letraset and Mike Daines Elsner+Flake 1968
grapes
guitarfishes
No kicking of balls please

Alessandro Butti designed the Quirinus font, released in 1939. Quirinus is a headline font with a strong contrast in strokes.

Noah (Alias) Alias
Gustavs Andrejs Grinbergs
Linotype 1997
German Cartographic Design
Linotype
Bauersche Gießerei
Linotype
Gareth Hague
Alias 1995
Alan Meeks
ITC 1988

Elsner+Flake
Danila Orlovsky
ParaType
Gareth Hague
Alias 2012
Gareth Hague
Alias 2013
Gustav F. Schroeder
Elsner+Flake 1892
Esselte Letraset and Mike Daines
Elsner+Flake 1968
Alessandro Butti
Monotype

Alias